the art of iteration

the idea that creativity is combinatorial, that nothing is entirely original, that everything builds on what came before, and that we create by taking existing pieces of inspiration, knowledge, skill and insight that we gather over the course of our lives and recombining them into incredible new creations.

It's important to do things fast: You learn more per unit time because you make contact with reality more frequently. Going fast makes you focus on what's important; there's no time for bullshit.

To me, challenging doesn’t look like the person who just grinds through a project to get it done, sacrificing sleep, family, or any semblance of balance. While brute force may be effective short -term, I’m convinced it doesn’t lend itself to sustainable creativity, joy, or meaning (and sustainability is everything – from a biological and mathematic... See more

Creativity: “I can’t get new ideas staring at a blank page. Creativity, for me, requires motion. When you go on a walk, you can turn your world into an idea-generating sensorium, and ideas will spring up from the most unlikely sources. There is one thing that’s absolutely certain about creativity: It’s an active process, not a passive one. The best... See more

Information is little pieces of idea that you have. Your speed lists will probably consist mostly of information.

After you collect a bunch of information, you'll detect patterns and relationships. As you integrate ideas together, it becomes far greater than the sum of the individual pieces- it becomes knowledge .

What is Wisdom? I define it as kno... See more

Synthesis as art:

“First of all, synthesizing involves artistry . To create a work or treatment of significant size and to convey it effectively to others requires a sense of form, of arrangement of parts, of the attention and predilection of audiences, of launching, development, and closure . All of these skills are identified particularly with th

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Creativity requires connecting the dots, and connecting the dots requires allowing time for my subconscious to consolidate my ideas and make associations. This means that, from time to time, I need to just stare out the window and do nothing.

This doesn’t feel productive, even though it is.